...And Never Let HerGo

deny it. It was true. He had told her that he would die for her. It was really the other way around; at the time Maurer referred to, not only would Debby have given her life for Tom, she had surrendered her free will and the control of her mind. She had believed everything he told her about his innocence and the conspiracy against him. Could
anyone
understand that?
    Once more, Maurer asked Debby about the encounters with Keith Brady and with her high school boyfriend. It had been Tom who was the voyeur but his attorney painted Debby as the harlot. “Now, these particular incidents that we just talked about relating to sexual activity that were brought up on direct examination are things that you say Tom basically made you do?”
    “He asked me to do them, yes.”
    “Not because that was an interest that you had, sexually, or things that you were interested in doing?”
    “We had talked about it—”
    “Does that mean it was something you were interested in doing too?” Maurer asked with a trace of sarcasm in his voice, “or only because he asked you to do it?”
    “I agreed to do it because he wanted me to do it,” Debby said quietly. “And I agreed because I was afraid not to.”
    Finally, Maurer moved away from questions about sex and began to question Debby’s testimony about the time period from June 26 through June 30. It was a strong defense technique: repeating what she had said earlier but with a hint of doubt in his voice as if he saw deception there.
    “Gene Maurer is one of the best criminal defense attorneys in Delaware,” Debby said a long time later, “and I was prepared for an onslaught of questions—but in the end, Tom didn’t allow him to do his job. There were long pauses between questions while Maurer read the notes that Tom kept handing him. It was obvious that Tom was in charge. And that helped me, because the pauses gave me time to gather my wits.”
    “Basically,” Maurer asked, changing directions again, “you say you learned on July second that the man that you’d waited for for all those years and who you wanted to marry was involved with a younger, attractive woman?”
    “I don’t know if those were my words, but—”
    “But you learned that?”
    “I learned that.”
    “How upset were you?”
    “I was upset.”
    “Angry?”
    “I was upset.”
    “Extremely
upset, weren’t you?”
    “Yes, I was.”
    But then Maurer’s words shocked Debby, just as Connolly and Wharton had warned her. “Didn’t you, in fact, find out about Anne Marie Fahey—not on July second—but on
June twenty-seventh and June twenty-eighth?”
    “No, Mr. Maurer, I never heard of Anne Marie Fahey until July second.”
    “Didn’t you go to 2302 Grant Avenue on June twenty-seventh or June twenty-eighth with a firearm to visit Tom?”
    “Mr. Maurer,” Debby said, her voice loud in her own ears, “I never left my property from the time I returned home from the Arden Swim Club until the next morning when I went to the Tatnall School.”
    “Very strenuous about that, aren’t you?”
    “I am.”
    “Didn’t you have your firearm at Tom Capano’s house on June twenty-eighth of 1996, where you first learned about him and Anne Marie Fahey?”
    “No, I did not.”
    “You deny that you discharged the firearm?”
    Debby looked at Maurer as if he had gone mad. She saw Tom’s face was a smug mask. “I deny that I discharged that—”
    “Are you absolutely certain about that?”
    “I’m
absolutely
certain.”
    “And you deny that
your
firearm discharged that night in that house, striking her?”
    “I don’t know what happened with that firearm. I gave that firearm to Tom Capano on May thirteenth.”
    The courtroom hush broke into scattered gasps and murmurs. The defense was apparently accusing Debby of Anne Marie’s murder. Debby looked down at Tom, her chin set. He would not meet her eyes. She realized then that he was quite willing to throw her away to save his own skin. “I remember looking at him,” Debby said, “and he finally looked up at me and he knew what I was thinking: It’s come to this, Tom, and here we are.”
    Her day on the stand was far from over, but it wasn’t Debby who broke; it was Tom. In midafternoon, Jack O’Donnell reported to Judge Lee that Tom was lying on a bench in the holding cell. “He claims he’s having a very bad colitis attack—that this is the worst it’s been.” Tom felt he was too weak to continue and wanted the judge to recess court